When the tech world first heard of the BlackBerry tablet, it was greeted with a fair amount of optimism. It was thought that the very daring (for RIM) device could be just what the company needed to get out of its unabashed slump in popularity, particularly in the United States. In addition, rumblings that the device would be able to run Android Market apps (and actually can now) had Android and RIM fans alike excited for the possibilities of cross-platform development.

Update 2: ASUS has issued an official statement on the matter and determined that the Prime's GPS is functioning as intended, which for many folks means essentially non-functional.

Please note that this product is not a professional GPS device ... To avoid inconveniencing users who demand a powerful GPS device, we made the decision to remove it from our specification sheet and marketing communications. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

According to Verizon's system update documentation, owners of big red's Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 can expect a software update any time now. While it isn't the Ice Cream Sandwich users are undoubtedly craving, the update (bringing system software to I905-EL01) offers quite a few interesting features.

Among these are improvements to Samsung's Touchwiz UX, a new Social Hub widget, built-in photo editing capabilities, and The Daily – a news app that allows users to "access the best of print, web, and broadcast news from around the world."

The update also brings Bluetooth 3.0 compatibility, additional support for more Wi-Fi routers, DivX, security patches, enhancements to TouchWiz's music and video players, and built-in support for "industry standard VPN clients." There's no word yet on just when the update will be available, but we'll be here to keep you updated.

For the first time, Android Police is having its go at a "best of the year" series, and we're going to need your help. Android Police will be featuring a number of posts in the coming weeks leading up to CES 2012 showing off the very best of what Android has brought to people around the world over the last year. Your favorite phones, tablets, apps, and games, will all be facing off for the chance at a (probably not very highly coveted) Android Police Andy Award, recognizing the best - above the rest.

In one of the the more recent weekend polls, we asked what is your ideal tablet screen size? - most users went for 9.51" - 10.5", which ended up taking about 50% of the overall votes. This is not much of a surprise since 10.1-inch is the most common size of Android tablet.

For those who don't already own a tablet, though, trying to decide what size to get can be somewhat of a task.

Word from a "trusted source" at BGR is that Samsung is set to unveil a new tablet at MWC packing an 11.6" screen at 2560x1600. That's nearly twice as many pixels as 1080p in a dinky 11.6" package; thanks to a thinner bezel, said package is only slightly larger than the Galaxy Tab 10.1. Unsurprisingly, other specs are bumped up a notch as well, with the tablet reportedly equipped with a 2GHz dual-core Exynos 5250 CPU.

If you're getting tired of reading eBooks on a tiny phone screen or looking for a new eReader application for that shiny new tablet, check out Aldiko Book Reader. This popular eBook application just received a huge update geared toward tablet users. It has an entirely new tablet-optimized user interface, which means reading books on your device will look much better than before. In addition to the user interface overhaul, here's everything else the update includes:

Support for opening and importing files into the app directly from the browser, email attachments, and third-party apps like Dropbox.

We've seen plenty of el-cheapo Android tablets hit the market in the last several months - most of which are running a phone version of Android, with no access to the Market or other Google products. Looks like MIPS Technologies is in the game to change the way we look at budget tablets, as it just announced a $99 ICS tablet. Yeah - $99. With ICS. Soak it up.

The 7-inch tablet is equipped with a 1GHz single-core MIPS-based XBurst CPU, and has the features we've all come to expect from a modern tablet, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, dual cameras, HDMI out, and microSD card slot.

In light of the slew of Asus Transformer Prime (the first tablet to pack NVIDIA's quad-core Tegra 3 CPU) reviews and the pending release of said device, we are curious to know: would you still buy a dual-core tablet? Perhaps you would, but only for a secondary/budget tablet? Or only if it were smaller?